Everything Is Boring & Everyone Is a Fucking Liar

Five years after their party-starting YoYoYoYoYo, Spank Rock returns with an album executive produced by Boys Noize with guests including Santigold; it's not nearly as much fun as it wants to be.

Remember when everyone was having panic-attack cred-spasms over skinny-jeans rap? Thinkpieces about indie appropriation, flame wars about "real hip-hop," stock insults hefted toward Billyburg trusties-- good times, right? Well, not every pioneer goes unrewarded. Five years after the Diplo-sanctioned fuck-bass shtick of Spank Rock's YoYoYoYoYo set critics' brows furrowing, there's a lucrative boom in party music that turns the once-communal dancefloor/club experience into overblown swag-level competitions between Red Bull-addled alpha males. And if you push hyperactive pussy-popping anthems to enough well-meaning lefty skeptics who are otherwise hesitant to buy into strip-club chic, eventually that noise will ricochet its way toward the mainstream. Anything that skeevy to the point of being problematic has to have real transgressive pop cred, right?

So waiting a good half-decade between the debut and the follow-up shouldn't matter too much. Not with an updated production sound and some choice gigs sharing bills with Ke$ha and LMFAO to back the sophomore effort. The beats on this new album signal a shift in emphasis from Spank Rock as self-contained Hollertronix-satellite rapper/producer group to Spank Rock as MC showcase, with YoYoYoYoYo's sonic architect XXXChange taking a backseat to a new palette heavy on German electro-scuzz specialist Boys Noize. It all bumps distractingly enough, sure. The opening salvo of "Ta Da" builds off a decent swath of plink-thump minimalism that serves as a little early snap-music nostalgia, and the Santigold-boosted "Car Song" pulls off a good mixture of jittery, late-nite, uptempo, indie dance-punk bombast. Even the token sop to indie-punk, the Death Set collaboration "Energy", has a neat interpolation of the break from Can's "Vitamin C" underpinning its bursts of freakout rock. The worst you can say about the production is that it can be sort of anonymous-- there's a song called "#1 Hit", and I bet you know what it sounds like without listening-- but it's nominally the sort of stuff an engaging presence on the mic can overcome.

Which brings us to the problem of Spank Rock himself. After originally carrying himself like a smartassed joker on the debut, he now comes across as someone more ambivalently unserious. Everything Is Boring & Everyone Is a Fucking Liar is the title, and maybe the easiest joke on the whole album: the cynical veneer on a loosely bundled collection of bass-rap tics that are delivered from a vantage point you can't quite see. There's no point in trying to sneak bass music through under cover of irony these days, but the edge that sparked Spank Rock's best moments back in the day either isn't there or flails around without direction. His rhymes are occasionally vaguely political, sometimes intentionally disingenuous, but never confident enough to tell you just where he stands. Somewhere between the rote, my-dick-rules bragging ("Hot Potato"; "Nasty"; "Race Riot on the Dance Floor") and the even more rote, I'm-so-fucked-up material (this is a dude who requests coke in place of salt on the rim of his margarita in "Cool Shit"), it's easy to hear that title's disillusioned cynicism in the spaces where the actual persona should be. YoYoYoYoYo at least tried to let some of the sketchier meat-market catcalls off the hook because they were funny; here it's just a bunch of boilerplate sex raps that seem a little too possessive to be fun.

Trying to engage the pop market with something there's already a surplus of is tricky enough when you're outsized enough to justify it. For Spank Rock, it just gets exhausting. He's a stylistic free-agent with a flow that drifts between Baltimore club, Southern bass, post-Guetta house-rap, and the occasional halfway-inspired Prince pastiche ("Baby"). But if his enthusiasm for genre-hopping gives him carte blanche to work his hyperactive, higher-register yawp into some interesting shapes, it does so at the expense of attention-getting things to say. And if lines stick out, it's usually because they're kind of tone-deaf-- "now I wanna go west (like Kanye?)/ I was thinkin' more Cornel" (wow, someone just heard his first Das Racist track). But his flow is either too rushed or too buried in the mix to jump out. What you're left with half the time for a lyrical identity is a hook, and the thing about hooks is that they work best if you can shout along without either feeling like an asshole or hoping everyone catches your scare quotes. If you can pull that off with lines like "shake it 'til my dick turns racist" ("Race Riot") or "I can make you famous/ He can buy you bottles but I can buy you Billboard" ("#1 Hit"), congratulations on overcoming the crippling burden of self-awareness.